Telcos have been providing network services for decades now and have always had to address the challenges of providing highly available, reliable services that can be easily managed. And yes, they have also had the continuous need to meet or exceed performance expectations while providing these services in a secure way. So, what is different today? Admittedly, the basic need to provide these services has not changed much. But the fundamental definition of what is meant by the all-too familiar network service terms of reliability, availability, manageability, performance and security has undergone a seismic shift.

Many telecommunications service providers are moving toward network function virtualization (NFV) as a way to implement flexible, scalable and secure application delivery. A move toward NFV means that software, rather than hardware, will be the deciding factor in the network performance of applications. We’ll be covering these topics and detail a combined, integrated solution offered by Red Hat and F5 Networks in an October 6 webinar delivered by Sandro Mazziotta, director of NFV product management at Red Hat and Paul Pindall, senior solution architect at F5 Networks.

If there’s one thing the digital age has shown us, it’s that business is moving faster. Digital providers are laser-focused and fully automated, and they’re deploying new apps and services as quickly as they can, sometimes in just minutes. No doubt, this has upped the ante for telecommunications companies. As such, downtime is more costly than ever, and reliability, availability and serviceability have to happen at cloud scale. At the recent Red Hat Summit 2016, held June 27-30 in San Francisco, I gave a presentation on what telco operators are looking for in cloud computing and how a Telco NFV Service Delivery Framework can meet their needs.

Continue reading “Adapting the networks of the future so they’re elastic, automated and well-managed.”

Red Hat just rolled out our OpenShift Online (Next Generation) service — our container cloud offering. This cloud-based service is designed especially for developing Docker and Kubernetes-based container applications, and is a great tool for today’s booming healthcare technology industry.